Then she shot, missing entirely at first, and finally she whanged a few bullets off the haunches of the moving targets. The shots were far more difficult than she had realized. She disgraced herself by storming out and not paying the penalty.
And then it was my turn. I confess, I had watched Lillian closely and knew she was not leading the target, so when I shot I did tolerably well; not setting any records, not whipping all competitors, but well enough. I won a little that way. Once again the press noticed it, chastising Lillian, praising Annie.
But William Cody turned cold, even hostile. This iciness increased as the season played out. We spent many a moment pondering what had set off Buffalo Bill’s animosity. Now, years later, I think it was simply that his frontiersman’s sense of the status of the sexes had been fatally affronted.
He was, actually, terribly old-fashioned if not sentimental, and that is one reason I don’t take sides whenever Louisa is discussed. Truly, William Cody didn’t want Louisa around, though the world thinks it was just the opposite. William Cody’s problem, from the beginning to the end of his life, was Women. Not just Louisa who was difficult enough, but all women and especially those, like me, who violated his sense of how the world should be.
Frank and I didn’t really grasp that, not then. We were hurt and angry by the colonel’s iciness and as the season wore out we decided to leave. Frank handled business and it was he who headed for the Colonel’s tent in September and told him we would be leaving at the end of the season.
Cody was not surprised. Neither did he object. Neither did he express any sense of loss. Neither did he thank us for anything we brought to his show. In fact, his response was just as we had expected. It was Nate Salsbury who grieved, who pressed his hands into Frank’s and mine and said how much he would miss us and how much of a treasure Annie Oakley had been to the Wild West.
We weren’t being rash. I had enough offers to appear in shooting exhibitions to keep us going. Beyond that, several shows and circuses had bid for my act. We stayed in London while the Wild West headed north for a winter season, and Buffalo Bill scarcely bid us goodbye. I truly didn’t expect to see him again and I’m sure the feeling was mutual. He thought he could do perfectly well without me but it turned out he was wrong. The press told him something he didn’t want to hear: that Annie Oakley’s departure had left a hole in the show.
We bided our time on the continent, engaging in various matches in France and England, enjoying ourselves even while making good money. The prizes were large and we won steadily. We didn’t really need Buffalo Bill’s Wild West... And yet we did. Frank and I knew how perilous was a life without a regular pay check. While we were afloat in Europe, we knew the ice was thin. So we began scouting for a berth in other shows and in due course we ended up with Pawnee Bill’s Wild West. It was a new show, and Gordon Lillie hadn’t worked out all the kinks in it, but my act was one reason it kept afloat.
I have always liked and admired Gordon Lillie, who had none of the vanity that fired up Buffalo Bill and far more financial acumen. The Pawnee Bill show was certainly second, and survived mostly because Cody was often in Europe. We trailed across much of the United States and I worked hard on new tricks that might enhance my act. In all the time we worked for the Pawnee Bill show, we had no trouble with personalities. Gordon Lillie was not a handsome man, nor a vain man, nor an egotistical man, and he and his May and Mr. and Mrs. Frank Butler became fast friends. We made good money, and as usual salted most of it away. But even so, this was not Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. It was not first. Not big time. But we didn’t have to deal with William F. Cody’s wounded chivalry.
(From the memoir of Colonel William F. Cody)
I never much cared for the way Annie Oakley and Frank Butler were running around England competing in shooting matches while they should have stayed close and helped make the Wild West a better show. Nate Salsbury had worked out a contract with them permitting them to do so in amateur competition. He was worried that Annie and Frank might abandon us if we didn’t give them some leeway. I opposed it but Nate insisted.
In the end, the Butlers quit us anyway and I knew it was all for the good, though it nearly demolished Nate’s composure. We gave Lillian Smith excellent billing and I thought she was a great asset even if she didn’t quite have Annie’s knack. Lillian was a dandy shot though once in a while skeptics claimed she was doing something or other that was deceptive. I didn’t care. She was just the right replacement for Oakley and the show seemed more orderly to me.
Annie joined the Pawnee Bill show for a season and then toured on stage, but she and Frank knew where the real money was and in 1889 they returned to the Wild West and stayed with us until that terrible train wreck in 1901 that destroyed most of our livestock and equipment and shook up Annie. She spent a short time recovering and was shooting in competition a few weeks later, in as good a form as ever.
Then, while soaking in the hot springs in Arkansas, Missie, as I’ve always called her, stayed immersed too long, almost died, and her hair turned white. That was the end of her appearances in the Wild West. Now, in her early forties, she had turned into a white-haired woman and the girlish look died. So she left us for the last time.
Frank became a traveling representative for the Union Metallic Cartridge Company, promoting the company’s cartridges at trap shooting meets while Annie continued to compete in contests, ever the dignified Quaker lady but no longer girlish. Annie took to the stage for a while, starring in various western dramas, taking full advantage of the celebrity she had acquired in the Wild West.
When she left us the show was never the same. We had long since become comfortable with each other. Annie was good for the Wild West, bringing hordes to the ticket window in her own right, and we were happy to have her. I look back on the Butlers as a tranquil island in the hurly-burly of the traveling show. They possessed something I yearned for and was envious of. They had truly become a team, each enriching the life of the other. He devoted his life to her happiness; she replied with the deepest affection any woman can give a man. How often I would sip tea with them and see in their union that which would always be denied me.
The antagonisms of the early years melted away, and I only regret them now. From what seemed great distances I watched them settle into various homes, often restlessly, but eventually they did find the nest they were looking for in North Carolina and there they whiled away happy years, their thrifty ways rewarding them now with a substantial retirement income.
I loved Missie from a proper distance, and still do.
Chapter 33
Gene Fowler
I knew Colonel Cody only when he was decrepit. I was born too late to see him at the apex of his career, an Olympic figure treading across continents in seven-league boots. By the time I began interviewing him, he was gaunt and gray, had played more shows, in more cities, than he could remember, had seen more successes and failures, more joys and heartaches, than any hundred other men.
I look back now with admiration though I didn’t really admire him when I was first covering him. Young Fowler regarded him as a curiosity, the sort of beast to needle if I could, a man whose veneer of fame hid a few little secrets I delighted to probe. In short, I was too young, and too green, to grasp what sort of man Cody really was.
Take that awful year of 1913, the year that my boss, Harry Tammen, deliberately destroyed the Two Bills Show. Cody wasn’t there at the auction, didn’t see the Deadwood Stage fall under the gavel, didn’t see his splendid white horse, Isham, sell for $150 to a Colonel Bills of Lincoln, didn’t see his spider phaeton go for thirty dollars, the prairie schooner go for twenty, his silver-mounted saddle go for $25. He didn’t see all that great riding stock go, the saddles and other gear. That would have been enough to kill a man of Cody’s age but the old showman refused to die.
Instead, eyes upon the future, he made a film. In fact, if I have the story right, Tammen himself suggested the idea but Cody refused to do it for Tammen and
Bonfils, though he had second thoughts and consulted with Tammen about how to do it. Eventually he made the film without Tammen’s help, working with the Essanay Film Company of Chicago, owned by George Spoor and Gilbert Anderson, hence the S and the A. It was Buffalo Bill’s idea to film the great events of his own life, to do this through the “Colonel W. F. Cody (Buffalo Bill) Historical Pictures Company.” That appealed to him. His life on celluloid, will be there for all to see long after his demise.
Meanwhile, the old boy had an offer to appear on the London Stage for a princely $2500 a week, but turned it down. He had better fish to fry. He wasted no time enrolling the retired General Miles to help, got the Secretary of the Interior to grant permission to film at Pine Ridge, and before long he had the whole 12th Cavalry, Miles’ old outfit, six hundred strong, to reenact the tragedy at Wounded Knee. As for the Indians, he hired his old friends from the show, Short Bull, No Neck, Woman’s Dress, Flat Iron and the rest. Just how they felt about filming the massacre, for that’s what it was, of Wounded Knee I can’t imagine, but money was so scarce on the Sioux reservations that coin in their pockets meant everything.
And there was Cody, surrounded by some of the old soldiers from the Indian Wars, and Nelson Miles, wanting to parade all 12,000 troops under his command. It came to eight one-reel features, each a chapter from Cody’s life, all for release in the nickelodeons mushrooming up around the country. Pretty good stuff, with lots of action, cowboys, bucking horses, cavalry men, stagecoaches, racing horsemen. And there was Cody, his face set firmly toward the future and film-making even while he captured the past. I thought that showed the mettle of the man. He was never a whiner.
He went out in 1914 with the combined Sells-Floto Circus and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, somewhat rehabilitated by his task-masters. But he was tired. He didn’t appear on horseback and I heard he was so creaky he could barely climb into a saddle. No more marksmanship, either, not with dulled eyes and trembling hands. But there he was, riding in a carriage, somehow magical as ever, catching the eye of everyone whenever he appeared. That’s when I began tracking his final years, watching the proud old stallion prance in the arenas only to sag into oblivion once he reached his dressing tent.
After the 1914 season closed, he took sick and spent time in Denver with his sister, May Decker. That’s when Tammen got to him again, offering him a contract for the 1915 season. Cody didn’t look very closely at the fine print but he signed on and the next spring he went out with the Sells-Floto circus once again.
Much to my astonishment, he was joined by Louisa for some of that tour. That caught my attention. But then I figured maybe the old goat was beyond skirt-chasing or maybe his Lulu was just keeping an eye on her milch cow now that he doddered a bit. That was the most likely explanation. She didn’t want to lose her source of cash so she came along to do some nursing.
What else could it have been? Only money, or the fear of losing it, would put Mrs. William F. Cody on the road. I mused about how he felt about that. Suddenly there she was, the pair of them on the road, he fetching his hundred a day and an alleged share of the gate over three grand. Alleged is the word. With Tammen operating that racket, Cody’s chance of getting a percentage of the gate was about as probable as Harry Tammen abandoning worldly things and retreating to a Trappist monastery.
Either that or Louisa was getting soft and sentimental. I wondered whether they fought, that tour of 1915, whether the old bats snapped and snarled. There was the old broad who had virtually accused her husband of causing her daughter’s death, and there was the old boy who had spent thirty years on the dodge from her, and there they were. Oh, I wish I had an Edison recording machine to pick up those little conversations.
Cody was sick about half the time that year but he never missed a show. These days, let someone have a sniffle, or let it rain, or let it be too cold, and the alleged star of the outfit would be locked in his hotel room sipping Irish whiskey while the understudy takes over. You know, that’s something right there. Cody never had an understudy, never had a double doing his tricks, never had anyone to fill in. Every time an audience laid eyes of Buffalo Bill they were seeing the real man. I have to hand it to him. Young punk that I am, I needed an education in courage and old Cody gave it to me.
When that wet, cold, swamped and lumbering season ended, with its near disasters, the frail old man had finally had his bellyful of Tammen and Bonfils and their gaudy newspaper, their rotten and dangerous circus tent, and their slick billing, which advertised the show for two bits while the price was forty cents at the ticket window. That infuriated him and he told the advance men never to use his name while promoting the show. He wouldn’t tolerate the fraud. Whatever else he had, he still possessed his pride and his honor, and he hated to see his name connected with trumpery.
But he was far from finished. He spent the winter scheming to pay off his debts, floating dude ranches and other ventures around in his head, obsessed with coming out on top when he retired. He claimed he had repaid $18,000 of the $20,000 out of his share of the season’s profits, but Tammen, as always, saw it other ways and suavely told the old colonel that lawyers and crooks had eaten up the profit and Cody still owed the twenty thousand. Thus had Tammen shifted the very terms of the contract to the season’s alleged net profit rather than the daily take.
Cody knew he could not beat Harry Tammen, with his fleets of lawyers and sleazy accountants and opportunistic henchmen. He could only leave once and for all and that is exactly what he did, bloodied, allegedly in debt, but with his soul and honor intact. You have to hand it to the old boy. He walked away with dignity.
He did finally hook up with the Miller brothers in 1916, his last show season, but found that Tammen now owned the name, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, and magnanimously would let old Cody get his name back only for the generous price of five thousand bucks. I work for a great guy, this Harry Tammen. Well, the Hon. William F. Cody swallowed another loss, this time of a name he had owned for decades, and went out anyway, old and frail, somehow rising to the occasion each time, playing Chicago and other cities, mostly rousing up some patriotic war and preparedness sentiment. The new show with the Miller Brothers and assorted people he’d never heard of was really rodeo, as it’s come to be, and much of the old west pageantry had vanished. War was looming and the watchword was preparedness, and there was a lot of flag-waving.
For whatever reason, Louisa wasn’t with him that final season. Maybe they had brawled again. Maybe she had her fill of the road. I think they were estranged, because when that 1916 season closed the old colonel headed for his sister, May Decker, in Denver where he hoped he might recover. But by now his ticker was bad, his lungs were bad, he was short of breath, and his strength had deserted him. He recovered a little, enough so that his doc sent him out to Glenwood Springs for some hot baths and mountain air. He seemed to gain ground there with May at his side, but there was a look in his eyes that hadn’t been there before, a look that said the final curtain was coming down, and indeed, that is what happened.
They took him home and put him to bed, over seventy years old, failing almost hourly. And yet old Honorable had risen from the grave before, found new strength and life and gone on for yet another round, another season, so there was guarded hope around that household and notices went out upon the land that the colonel was recovering his health.
But that season was his last season, and the old boy would go out on the road no more. He began to fail, and the press took notice, and then he was gone.
I think congress should award him another medal of honor, for gallantry beyond the call of duty in the domestic wars.
(From the memoir of Colonel William F. Cody)
Sometimes I lie on my cot now with Millers 101 show, and remember how it was when the Wild West and the Congress of Rough Riders toured the world. How it was to assemble the whole cast before the show and watch the cowboys in their chaps and big hats saddle up, the Sioux apply red and yellow and black war paint, the Cos
sacks and cavalry line up their matched horses and exercise them.
How it was to watch the stands fill on a sunny day, when people from miles away poured in, found a shady spot, settled down for an afternoon of excitement and glory, the men in straw boaters, the women in bonnets. I remember how it was to get myself up in my golden fringed buckskins and saddle Isham and climb onto that eager mount in the bright sun. I remember how we lined up for the opening parade, and when the Cowboy Band struck up the Star Spangled Banner we would be lined up and ready.
Oh, say can you see...
And then the grand review! Old Glory first, silken in the breeze, the brass band blaring, and then The Rough Riders of the World would sally forth, clop clop, clop, cavalry from America, France, Russia, England and Germany, and what a parade they made, all spit and polish, the horses walking in unison, banners and guidons waving.
Then it was Annie’s turn, and we watched as she dipped out from the backdrop, blowing kisses to them all, and then performing feats of marksmanship that left people agog, seeing things they hadn’t thought possible. One glass ball after another. Aces of hearts bulls-eyed. Glass balls demolished. Oh, we were smart to put her high in lineup, show the whole world the magical Annie Oakley. She fascinated every male, intrigued every woman until the last bow, and she vanished from sight.
And then, motion! A horse race between a Cowboy, a Cossack, an Arab, an Indian and a Mexican, all dressed in their bright costumes, each riding a horse native to their own lands. We turned the race into a story!
The Honorable Cody Page 25